The Federal Commission has listed seven big bumps in the road towards …

Share this story

Almost two-thirds of adults have broadband connections at home, but that's a long way from the ultimate goal: universal adoption of high speed Internet throughout the United States. Depending on which study you believe, we're everything from number 11 to 24 in international broadband penetration rankings.

So how do we get to somewhere near number one? The Federal Communications Commission's broadband task force has identified seven "gaps" or roadblocks along the path to the Holy Grail. The document doesn't offer any specific solutions to these problems. But the analysis offers clues as to where that National Broadband Plan the Commission has to crank out by February is going.

Here are the seven party poopers in the order that the FCC lists them. We've added some solutions that various advocates have proposed or the industry has already implemented to help fix these conundrums.

1. The Universal Service Fund. The USF was created to directly subsidize phone service for low income people and to support service providers in rural areas. It does all that, but at an exorbitant cost and with increasingly irrelevant results. The United States now spends about $7 billion every year to support this pooch, a result of lousy auditing methods, goofy standards for measuring provider costs, and an intercarrier compensation system that was designed for a pre-IP-telephony world.

Most importantly, although the USF offers computer support for schools and rural heath care centers, much of the program subsidizes telephone rather than broadband use. That's why everybody from reform advocates to the cable industry want a massive overhaul of this dinosaur.

The key to change is coming from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, where drafts of the Universal Service Reform Act of 2009 are being vetted. The consensus is that USF recipients have to offer broadband, the low income and high cost funds have to be capped, and intercarrier comp modernized. But the bill's still in the discussion stage at this point.

2. The broadband adoption gap. People are glomming onto broadband at starkly variant rates, the FCC notes. Only 35 percent of households with incomes of $20,000 or less subscribe to a high speed service. Forty percent of Hispanic households buy monthly broadband, versus 65 percent of white households (although digital divide improves when you add wireless to the mix).

What's the fix here? More affordable broadband services for sure (see gap number one). It will also be interesting to see if the money that the Department of Commerce is dishing out for sustainable broadband projects will encourage more adoption among rural and low income people.

3. The consumer information gap. Do consumers have enough information, the agency asks, to determine the actual speed and quality of the broadband services offered on the market? The reform groups say no. The telcos and cable companies say yes. Looks like the FCC says no, too. They "lack information about actual performance of their broadband service compared to the advertised speeds," the list concludes.

4. The spectrum gap. Welcome to the "looming wireless spectrum crisis." By 2011, more people will be buying smartphones rather than vanilla mobiles. "Smart phone subscriptions have increased by 690 percent since 1998, while over-the air TV viewership decreased by 56 percent," the FCC notes. As a consequence of this, the wireless industry will need more spectrum, bemusing news in the wake of the $19.6 billion dollar auctioned buyout of the 700 MHz band by big wireless in 2007.

Now there's even lots of talk about reallocating more TV spectrum to the wired world (the broadcasters hate the idea, it should be noted). Wherever this goes, it's going to take a long time to get there. The Commission estimates that it takes 6-13 years to move spectrum licenses around.

5. The deployment gap. There's also a huge "middle mile" problem out there in backbone-land, the FCC warns: "Costs for transit and transport of Internet traffic can cost rural providers up to $150 per subscriber annually, almost three times as much as network operations, and can be a serious barrier to rural broadband."

Here's hoping the $4 billion-plus that the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture are handing out for middle-mile projects will address this problem. But another piece of this issue has to do with the special access rates that the big telcos charge to smaller providers. That's a regulatory rather than a buildout challenge.

6. The television set-top box innovation gap. Video/TV/Internet convergence is forging "a new broadband medium that could drive adoption and utilization," the FCC notes, but "retail navigation device and set-top-box market competition has not emerged, limiting innovation." Devices that merge TV and IP-video are critical for a "healthy broadband ecosystem," the Commission says.

Hey, cheer up. Microsoft has just announced that Windows 7 users can install CableCARD-powered digital TV tuners in their PCs, use them with switched digital video (SDV) cable systems, and record content more easily. So at least some of that convergence is happening.

7. The personal data gap. Users have "little control over their personal information," the FCC warns, as more and more of it migrates to the Internet cloud. "Ensuring privacy and security will enable a new generation of applications, and improve top national priorities that would benefit by secure but accessible personnel information." Look to everything from Congressionally mandated data sharing opt-in rules to proposed regulations on behavioral advertising to address this problem.

These seven gaps "must be filled before America can take advantage of the technological advantages that universal adoption and deployment of affordable, robust broadband can bring," the FCC notes. The big question is what the agency thinks it and Congress must do to fill them.

Further reading

Share this story

Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar